


Sing Me a Song

by AssoverTeakettle



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fae, Fae & Fairies, Gen, M/M, Soft Neil Josten/Andrew Minyard, fae Neil Josten
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-13
Updated: 2019-06-13
Packaged: 2020-05-07 07:04:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19204330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AssoverTeakettle/pseuds/AssoverTeakettle
Summary: Andrew is hanging on by the skin of his teeth and the stretch of woods behind his newest foster home. It doesn't take long for him to discover that it's not just him seeking refuge there.It takes him longer still to realize a refuge is more than a place.





	Sing Me a Song

> 
>     Where dips the rocky highland
>     Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
>     There lies a leafy island
>     Where flapping herons wake
>     The drowsy water rats; 
>     There we've hid our faery vats, 
>     Full of berrys
>     And of reddest stolen cherries. 
>     Come away, O human child!
>     To the waters and the wild
>     With a faery, hand in hand, 
>     For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
> 
> W. B. Yeats,  "The Stolen Child" 

Andrew is twelve when he meets Neil. 

It’s his third foster home. An old house on the outskirts of a town in South Dakota that could have had inviting picture windows and boxes of flowers on porch steps if there was enough money and love to go around. Andrew already knows there isn’t. The paint peels and the windows have poor insulation layered upon itself like scabbed skin. And the people who live inside can’t save enough to care.

Of his two foster siblings here he is the oldest. And as the oldest he is teaching the younger ones how to survive in silence. When to leave a room, when to stay, when to turn away, and when to stand and stare down the adults. 

The only good thing about this foster home is the fringe of wild looking woods that creeps into the backyard. This far into suburban housing the woods are a few old trees that grew tall and beautiful a long time ago and their younger starving cousins that try to follow them to sunlight. The rest is tangled brush and leaf litter.

Despite that, the woods feel deep and they swallow sound into their shadows. A twelve-year-old boy can hide very easily here and no one would find him unless he called out. Andrew has already decided that he prefers this. The trees don’t care if he’s sitting on their roots, bleeding on their leaves or healthy. They don’t pretend things are fine or that they should be better, they just are what they’ve always been.

There is no pretending and there are no lies.

These woods are his place. His land of soft earth and rotting logs in between a few cracked asphalt roads.

Summer has just begun now, school is out and there’s suddenly a lot more time at home. 

Andrew knows every single knot on every tree in these woods.

It’s been a rough day and Andrew can feel every hand that’s touched him like a rash on his skin. The woman caught one of the younger boys taking extra food from the pantry and Andrew had stepped in between. It didn’t do much, really. But it was something. 

Even now Andrew’s cheek throbs where she hit him and his shoulder blades smart from the metal cupboard handles in the kitchen. 

Andrew’s sitting on one of the downed trees, a half-rotted log with its roots half buried and half reaching for the sky when he sees him. Not ten feet away is another young boy crouched by one of the weak trickles that wants to be a stream here. 

He looks to be Andrew’s age, or somewhere close. He’s skinny with his bare feet planted firmly in the muck and clothes that look like they’re made of leather and something mesh-like sewn together in a crazy patchwork. His pants are the same and strips of fabric tickle the back of his calves where he crouches studying the brackish water, head cocked. Here at evening his hair is a dark blackish-brown, the shadows dying him purple and blue on his pale skin.

When the barefoot boy turns his head just so Andrew can see his eyes. In the shafts of light that barely touch down here in the undergrowth they're so pale they gleam the same red-gold as the sunset for a heartbeat. Then he spots Andrew and when he turns to stare back his eyes flicker out in shadow.

They stare at one another, both still and silent, two animals coming across one another in the woods. 

Andrew doesn’t move. He clenches his fists tighter around his knees until his knuckles feel like they’ll pop through his skin. But he doesn’t move and he doesn’t look away.

The barefoot boy stares back at him, moon-eyes wide and watchful. He leans forward once or twice and jerks back as if catching himself in the motion. It isn’t until the sun is truly set and the shadows are more blue than purple that he bolts into the undergrowth, pale legs flashing between trunks and disappearing. 

When he’s gone and Andrew is alone on his stump again he finally breathes out.

  


Ben Stokes works in schools and offices as a maintenance technician and custodian. 

The day hours are safer, it’s only Pam around the house watching her shit daytime soaps and attempting yard and house DIYs. Pam is a bitter, angry person but bruises heal. She’s never had him on his knees.

Sometimes Andrew wonders if she suspects there’s more to the times Ben pulls Andrew aside but she never asks. But her gaze is always pinched with unhappiness. 

Andrew doesn’t let Pam bother him, he has had other foster parents like Pam and they’re ultimately harmless in comparison to the ones like Ben. Pam loves to dish out punishment but she’s never taken anything from Andrew. Not like Ben has. 

So day hours are great. Andrew has learned to sleep long and heavy during the day while he can in the yard, in the closets, the woods.

The nights are the worst. 

Ben comes home and if he’s not bitching at everyone and drinking himself stupid then he’s pulling Andrew aside and locking the door. 

Andrew tried to hide once at another foster home. 

He knows better now. 

Andrew has seen the way Ben sometimes looks at his foster sister Maisie. She’s only nine but that never stops anyone. So Andrew stays.

  


Not tonight.

Andrew is running. He crashes out the back door, no shirt, no shoes, just running for the woods. 

Ben slams into the screen door and fumbles with it before he’s out and after Andrew. “Hey! You little son of a bitch get back here!” Ben’s raging crashes into the edge of the woods just behind Andrew. 

Andrew can only focus on breathing. To think of anything else at all would make him stumble, would send him sprawling and he knows that the only option he has is to keep running.

Later Andrew will thank all his daylight wanderings in these woods because they guide his feet down invisible trails as he jumps and races through them. Brambles, downed logs and other obstacles trip his pursuer.

His luck can only last so long.

A stray root catches Andrew’s bare foot, skinning the top of it and sending him to the ground in a spray of dirt and leaves. 

His hands scramble at the ground and distantly Andrew curses his own sudden panic because his breath knots in his chest and he can’t _think!_

Andrew can hear Ben stumble to a halt not ten feet away from him. Andrew can hear his rasping breath and the sound sends his stomach heaving. He can feel the memory of that breath on him, the rank heat of it on his face, his back, and Andrew freezes. 

Quick as a snake Ben whips around and crashes through the trees again, “I see you, you little bitch! Don’t think you can hide from me!”

The crashing and incoherent roaring fades and Andrew breathes a little deeper. He ignores the trembling in his hands.

He digs his fingers into the cool dirt in front of him. He can feel nightcrawlers and beetles investigating his fingers and ambling over and away in search of food.

He stays hunched over, clutching the dirt until the only sounds he can hear are his own slowing breath and the crickets and other night sounds in suburban woods.

By the time Andrew raises his head the trees are bathed in soft moonlight. Thin whippy branches are gilded in silver and the dark patterns of leaves and bark look like wet, liquid paint.

When he looks up Andrew meets the wide, staring eyes of the barefoot boy.

He’s still skinny and he’s still pale. He’s crouching, facing Andrew, elbows on his knees and hands dangling to fret with the moss between his feet. His eyes are as reflective as the last time Andrew saw him, wide and moon-like. He’s wearing sweat pants that look like a Walmart special this time and the contrast is almost more offputting than the staring.

In the dark his hair is nearly black. 

“He’s gone,” the boy says. 

Hearing his voice is startling in a way that few things are for Andrew anymore. It’s shockingly normal, if a little hoarse. Andrew doesn’t reply and instead just rocks back from his knees to his heels. He decides to hold one trembling wrist with his other hand.

Moon-boy doesn’t seem to notice or care that Andrew hasn’t responded. He stares back and it’s strange. If Andrew did this to a stranger in broad daylight they would smack him for being a rude little fuck. In the moonlight in this strange strip of woods it's disquieting in the way sudden silence can be, too much all at once. 

“Is he your father?”

Andrew doesn’t mean to but his mouth drops open a little.

“I...what makes you think so?”

Now Moon-boy looks wrong footed. He glances around eyes rabbit quick and shifts uneasily. “Isn’t...don’t,” he struggles, “don’t you live with your parents?”

“He’s not my father.”

If anything Moon-boy’s puzzlement grows, “Then why are you living with him?”

Abruptly done with the conversation Andrew stands and brushes himself off, “Foster home.”

Even without Moon-boy saying it Andrew can see him repeating the word in his head like its some exotic food on a takeout menu. Andrew rolls his eyes and straightens. 

When Andrew looks up Moon-boy is standing too. He’s even skinnier standing.

The boy seems to be processing this turn of events. He just stares for a time, the smallest of frown lines pulling at his brow. He asks, “What would he have done if he had caught you?”

Even if Andrew had wanted to tell him the tar of shame and sickly rage bubbles too hot inside him. He says nothing.

The boy stares and waits. It isn’t until a stronger breeze rustles the leaves around them that he blinks and looks away, his strange focus diverted. 

Andrew tries to tell himself he doesn’t shiver a little.

Moon-boy seems distant now, his head is tilted back, his eyes closed in concentration as though he is listening to something or someone far away. The wind that sighs through the trees runs its fingers through his hair, mussing it even further and fading into silence leaving the tips of his ears showing, noticeably pointed. 

When he opens his eyes, Moon-boy seems calmer. He turns to Andrew and says, “If you don’t want to answer that’s fine. Father’s and sons don’t really matter much, blood or not.” Andrew meets the other boy’s gaze, “Blood never matters, people are all the same.”

Moon-boy nods solemnly as though Andrew has just put forth some greater philosophical truth. He says, “My father wants to kill me.” It is a flat, expressionless confession and completely unsolicited, Andrew notes with some private incredulity.

As if he can sense Andrew’s split desire to know more and less simultaneously, Moon-boy smiles and it is a sly, sharp thing.

  


The rest of the night passes faster than it should. Andrew remembers wandering between trunks in aimless trails, the Moon-boy following him, sometimes leading him, always a little more than an arm’s distance away. 

There’s less talking than Andrew had imagined too. His strange shadow goes silent and thoughtful after that first round of questions. He seems content to wander beside Andrew in this small patch of forest, occasionally tapping a tree branch to show Andrew the way a spider’s web has been shot through with light, or darting over and up a fallen log to spook the bats swooping past.

Once, when he raced across the path Andrew noticed that although his feet sank into the mud the same as his own, when the boy moved on there was no trace he had ever been there. Andrew paused a moment contemplating before the quiet pause of the other pulled him forward. 

It isn’t until Andrew wakes up in his own bed, muddy tracks on his sheets and across the floor, leaves strewn everywhere, that he realizes he never got the boy’s name.

  


It takes three days and three nights for Ben to return. 

By then police reports had been filed, search parties sent out, investigations begun. Everyone had sat Andrew down and asked question after question after question. 

“Mrs. Stokes says Ben chased you out of the house last night into the woods. What did he do? Did anything happen? Where is he now? What happened that night?”

Everyone wanted answers that Andrew didn’t have, not for himself and certainly not for them. 

Sitting in the kitchen, surrounded by investigators and police, all Andrew had was the memory of a hoarse voice and sly silver eyes.

The third night they heard a knock at the door.

Pam answered it and behind her Andrew and the other fosters trailed behind, wary.

Under the porch light, looking haggard, Ben stared back at them all. 

His clothes were sap stained and torn by branches, some still clinging to his shoulders and back. His skin was mottled with bruises and dirt and he had the same sunken eyes as someone sick with the flu, waxy under the too bright artificial lights of the house.

Already singing the Lord’s praises, Pam fussed and fretted over him, hauling him inside and dragging him down the hallway to the kitchen.

As their strange little train followed Ben and Pam to the kitchen Andrew jerked his chin at Maisie and Rob, sending his foster siblings to split off down the hallway to their bedrooms. 

They knew to lock the door.

Pam settled Ben on a kitchen chair and headed for the stove to warm something up. 

Andrew settled by the doorway, silent, waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

Ben’s reactions were delayed like a sleepwalker just waking up. He tolerated Pam’s fussing but other than his placid acceptance of her worry he didn’t focus on her. Instead, stiff and slow, Ben turned to look at Andrew. 

The morning after when Andrew had just finished smashing a pile of leaves into the small garbage in his room, Pam had come in shrieking and demanding answers. “Where is he?! What did you do to him?! You murdered him didn’t you, you little monster!”

And Andrew, off footed and shaky himself that morning, hadn’t been able to retort at all. Not to Pam, not to the police, not to anyone else. 

Ben’s expression begins to sour, he opens his mouth to spew something at Andrew and then he freezes. 

His gaze is fixed beyond Andrew, down the short front hall to the picture window beside the door.

The anger drains away and he flinches turning his eyes away from the window and when Andrew turns to look there is nothing there.

  


Later, Andrew watches Moon-boy from his window. 

It’s after midnight.

The yellow-orange yard-light is a pale echo in the backyard, its reach blocked by the bulk of the house and the old twisted trees that flank it. 

And there he is, standing under the branches where the yard turns into that small strip of woods behind it.

It’s too dark and too far away to reliably see his face but somehow Andrew knows that the boy is looking at him, waiting for him. 

It’s the work of a moment to heave the window open.

_This is stupid, but here we are,_ he thinks.

Andrew slips out onto the roof and creeps across to the large trellis Pam has on the east side of the house to make his way down to the ground, one careful foot at a time.

It is the first time he leaves the house this way.

It will not be the last.

  


"I don't go on moonlit walks with nameless idiots."

"You can call me Neil."


End file.
